Money for financed campaigns can be better spent

By Brian Sampson, Commentary

Published 4:53 pm, Wednesday, March 26, 2014

As too often happens when matters are discussed in the Capitol, the rhetoric in support of taxpayer-funded political campaigns omits a central aspect of instituting a state program of taxpayer-financed campaigns in New York — its cost.

Asking taxpayers to finance elections for governor, attorney general, state comptroller and all 213 state legislative seats is no small favor in a state that last week was rated as the worst in the nation for taxpayers by the website WalletHub.

The true cost of a statewide campaign finance system is largely unknown, because our state could potentially be forced to fund the campaigns of every eligible candidate in elections for all of the aforementioned offices, but intelligent estimates range from a low of $104 million per four-year political cycle to a high of $333 million. Would this money not be better spent on repairing aging infrastructure, expediting ongoing storm recovery efforts, restoring the Gap Elimination Adjustment, or providing tax relief for struggling middle-class families?

Even in the age of tight budgets, the price tag might be justifiable if such a system actually accomplished its purported goal of rooting out corruption in Albany, but, the truth is, public financing of political campaigns actually incentivizes and subsidizes corruption rather than eliminates it. New York City, on which the proposed state system of taxpayer-financed campaigns is modeled, has experienced no demonstrable decrease in corruption cases since its public financing program was instituted in the late 1980s and has even seen a new form of abuse emerge, one where candidates run just to milk the public dollars afforded them for campaigning and then dole out those tens of thousands of dollars to family, friends, connected vendors and political patrons under the guise of "campaign expenses."

Further, public campaign financing cannot, and does not purport to, do anything to limit the growing impact of independent expenditure committees. Rather than hold individual candidates accountable for the source of their funds and the character of their campaign, public financing would steer the very money it seeks to eliminate from the electoral process into the coffers of independent expenditure committees that have become more prevalent since 2010s Citizens United Supreme Court decision.

The Moreland Commission's dissenting opinion supports this assertion: "Simply put, public financing has done little to stop the importance of large sums of money from politically and financially powerful groups."

Lastly, it is no secret and no surprise that those advocating loudest for state-wide public financing are New York's powerful labor interests. Not only would a public finance system magnify big labor's already dominant role in state politics at the expense of opposing viewpoints, it would incentivize greater use of independent expenditure committees, of which labor is one of the biggest benefactors in the nation.

New York needs honest deliberation about the integrity of those who hold its most powerful positions and how we elect them, but forcing hundreds of millions in new spending upon overburdened taxpayers in the false name of ethics reform is not the remedy to New York's ills.